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January 01, 2001

Survey Wrap-Ups

Summaries of recent survey findings on breaking industry issues.

Evans Data Corp.'s Wireless Developer Survey reveals that 26.5 percent of respondents are likely to use public key encryption as their wireless applications' security device compared to a little more than 7 percent of developers who will use digital signatures. Another 21.3 percent opted for password protection. Almost 15 percent chose WAP 2.0 security while 10 percent selected smart cards.

An AMR Research study of IT spending by midsize to large companies across 13 industries predicts that IT budgets for manufacturing and service companies will increase 5 percent next year. The rise mainly comprises increases for customercentric and ecommerce activities. In manufacturing, for example, spending for ecommerce application development is expected to increase from 19 percent of the budget to 23 percent between 2000 and 2002. In contrast, spending for ERP projects will drop 5 percent from 42 percent in 2000 to 37 percent in 2002.

An ASP Industry Consortiumsponsored survey by Zona Research Inc. sampled 137 senior and executivelevel managers and IT professionals in the United States who (1) have purchasing authority for or involvement with general office productivity or software and (2) have indicated that they are either currently using ASP services or plan to in the next 12 months. The results:

Thirtyseven percent indicated that the acceptable level of application downtime could be no more than 53 minutes per year (99.99 percent uptime rate). Another 7 percent said that no more than 5.3 minutes per year (99.999 percent uptime) was acceptable, while an additional 7 percent demand 99.9999 percent uptime (32 seconds per year downtime rate).

Sixtyone percent rank "security of my data may be compromised" as the most important potential issue that could arise from using an ASP.

In the customers' view, the most important Internet security technologies that ASPs need to support and provide as service offerings are antivirus software, software firewalls, userbased access control/authentication, and intrusion detection.

Among respondents using or planning to use ASPs for education and training, 69 percent cited IT skills (networks, application development, systems, and so on) as the type of applications in current or planned use, followed by applicationuse training (PowerPoint, Lotus Notes, PeopleSoft, and so on) at 63 percent, management and business skills at 47 percent, and HR training or career development at 42 percent each.

The most common reason nonASP users gave for not using or planning to use ASP services was that the respondents had sufficient IT resources inhouse to run applications (56 percent), followed by a belief that ASPs have no cost advantage (45 percent). Another 33 percent said ASPs had never contacted them about their needs, while 31 percent said they were not familiar enough with the ASP concept.

IntelligentCRM.com Forum:

CRM and Knowledge Management Based on Business Intelligence "Addey" writes: "This is just my opinion, but I think that the term 'business intelligence' only paints half the picture. The other half is something that could be called 'environmental intelligence.' You need to know about your internal environment (business intelligence) comprising the data, processes, people, and technology that make up your organization. But you also need to know about your external environment (environmental intelligence) comprising macro customer behavior and attitude, market demands and market/technological innovations, and the legal constraints and risks that make up your environment.

Once you have this knowledge, you use it to your tactical and strategic advantage. CRM is just a general term describing the paradigm of finding new customers and keeping existing ones by using all the internal and external knowledge that you have."

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IntelligentKM.com Forum:

Any Hints for New KM?

Andy Ho Tsz Keung of Hong Kong writes: "After studying [the knowledge management process] for a while, I decided to categorize all the existing experience and practices first. Are there any guidelines or suggestions for a newcomer?"

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Denham Grey responds: "Starting with a knowledge mapping or an audit of your intellectual capital is one way to go. I prefer to start with a conversation that reveals what knowledge means within the organization. Once there is agreement on what to look for, where to pay attention, and how to improve, any mapping or audit is just a whole lot easier. Here are some links and notes on knowledge mapping to help you: www.voght.com/cgi-bin/pywiki?KnowledgeMapping."

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KM System Design

David Shunkwiler writes: "I'm an IT project manager who is running a workshop to design a global knowledge management system. I'm struggling to find a methodology to define KM business processes and business rules so that we can build a system. Anyone have any advice?"

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Denham Grey responds:

"I like to start with a conversation about knowledge. The form, values, nature, and types of knowledge are different for each organization. It is difficult to do a requirements analysis unless individuals and departments have given deep consideration to what knowledge means to them, such as what type of knowledge objects they will be dealing with (events, best practices, lessons learned, documents, or Web conferences), what inference, functionality, and processing they require (annotation, version control, or instant messaging), and how their information will flow.

If you are looking for a workbook on knowledge processes, try Wendi R. Bukowitz and Ruth L.

Williams' Knowledge

Management Fieldbook

(Financial Times Prentice Hall Publishing, 1999). It has many checklists and questionnaires you can use."

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Don't Touch That Dial

I was very interested in Justin Kestelyn's editorial ("Prime Time BI," September 29, 2000) on the emergence of the massive business intelligence (BI) databases to be grown by the e-TV players. I suspect that the "opt-in" question is of critical importance in e-TV.

For several generations, we've been systematically taught by commercials how inadequate and unfulfilled we are (until we buy this thing or that, of course).

I feel that unless there is a widely available facility that permits and encourages us to actively define not what to block out - but what to let in - we are headed for a society profoundly brainwashed by the media and marketing companies. Their power over us will be so much greater because they will soon be "optimizing" the dynamic content based on our psych profiles in their rich personalization databases.

They will know when I am watching - or even signed on - and they will show me whatever they think will activate compulsive buying. They will carefully pull up from their database those images (such as BMW motorcycles touring the pacific coast in May) that can get me to click an order form before I think too much (or at all) about the implications for my responsibilities to others and myself. And then there's the consideration of how this can complicate the task of character formation for my children.

Jon Farmer
Lambertville, Mich.